Thursday, August 6, 2020

Art as a tool of Palestinian Resistance

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Vanshita Banuana

Article Title

Art as a tool of Palestinian Resistance

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Global Views 360

Publication Date

August 6, 2020

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Graffiti of former PFLP militant, Leila Khaled

Graffiti of former PFLP militant, Leila Khaled | Source: Edgardo W. Olivera via Flickr

The Israel-Palestine conflict is one that has been fraught with violence and displacement, more so for the Palestinians. This is a complicated history of war and disagreement over the possible solutions. However in recent years, the actions of Israel’s right-wing coalition government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are making the path to peace even more difficult.

Many artists, especially those of Palestinian origin, across the creative mediums, have turned to art as a medium of expression against the Israeli government’s repressive policies and to show the suffering of the Palestinian people.

Graffiti of  Marouane Barghouti, imprisoned Palestinian activist | Source: thierry ehrmann via Flickr

The heroes of Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation are a popular subject of resistance art by Palestinian artists. It is mainly expressed in the form of murals, graffities, and posters.

Another important theme in Palestinian art surrounds the Nakba, which refers to the exodus of a large number of Palestinians after the formation of the state of Israel.

Palestinian refugees leaving the Galilee in October–November 1948 | Source:  Fred Csasznik via Wikimedia

A popular street artist Banksy has left his unique mark in support of Palestinian resistance, and not just in the form of street art which lines the Israeli West Bank barrier and other areas of the West Bank.

Street Art by Banksy | Source: Dan Meyers via Unsplash

Banksy also opened the Walled Off Hotel in 2014 where all the rooms overlook the barrier or apartheid wall, as it is known in Palestine, and each contains various artworks depicting life under occupation.

The most recent contribution from Banksy in this regard has been a small art piece that was displayed inside the hotel last Christmas, called ‘The Scar of Bethlehem.’ It depicts a nativity scene (the birth of Jesus) set to the backdrop of the concrete barrier, with a bullet hole in it resembling a star and has garnered praise from many western news outlets as a symbol of solidarity with Palestinian suffering.

Posters, and innovative methods of distributing the same, are another form of artistic protest. These range from the posters by various artists published in a leftist French newspaper, meant to be cut out and pasted on walls by the public; to the Turkish graphic design professors using public walkways to exhibit posters in solidarity with Gaza.

A card marking the tenth anniversary of the launching of the Palestinian revolution in 1965 | Source: Nawal Abboud via The Palestinian Poster Archives

Posters have also sprung up in various places across the world, including Israel, calling for active demonstrations against Israel’s plans to annex the West Bank. All of the mentioned posters continue to be collected in the digital archives of the Palestine Poster Project.

Another popular collection dates back to 1970s Australia, circulated by Ali Kazak, a Palestinian ambassador, called “landscape posters” for their focus on Palestinian land. Many posters utilised symbols such as traditional Palestinian dresses, fruits such as olives and oranges, and keys, which refer to the refugees.

Some of the older art from around the 1970s focused on pre-war Palestinian life and culture, while the newer art takes a multi-media form through photographs, science fiction and films. Similarly, many murals can be found surrounding Land Day, which serves as a reminder of a massacre in 1976 in response to a protest.

Artistic symbolism also often uses the concept of Sumud, which means resilience in Arabic, and is used to refer to a “sense of rootedness” to Palestinian land.

Music also found its voice as a form of self-expression and resistance. In 2018, music platform Boiler Room hosted Boiler Room Palestine for the first time. The show featured a diversity of Palestinian artists from Palestinian and Israeli territories. The crew for the show had to enter Palestine through Israel, giving them a small taste of the limitation of movement for Palestinians.

Palestinian art continues to grow as a form of self-expression, as a form of resistance to Israeli policies, and as forms of cultural history in an endeavour to keep Palestinian spirits and identity alive as their lives get shrunk into smaller and smaller pieces of land.

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February 4, 2021 5:07 PM

India’s New Education Policy (NEP) 2020: What it proposes for Schools

On 30th July 2020, the Indian government’s Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) was renamed the Ministry of Education as it announced the new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.

The National Education Policy is an in-depth framework outlining the future and development of education in India. It’s recommendations guide what the priorities and goals of educational institutions should be in the coming years. The first NEP was passed in 1968; while it gets revised occasionally, a new NEP has only been passed two times since then, in 1986 and now in 2020.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s and the government was hailed by RSS-affiliated educational organisations for the NEP as a step to connect the education with the roots of India. They reportedly had quite an influence during the drafting of NEP, even going as far as to say that “60-70 percent” of their demands have been met.

On the other hand, NEP received criticism from the opposition parties like Congress, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and political figures in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. The criticism was primarily for bypassing Parliamentary discussion, and its ill-fittedness in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ever-growing digital divide left in its wake in the education sector.

The NEP’s ambitious claims and propositions are divided into two broad categories: school, and higher education.

NEP at School Level

At school level, perhaps the biggest change is the move away from the 10+2 structure to a 5+3+3+4 one, signifying four stages of school education across ages 3-8 years (Foundational), 8-11 years (Preparatory), 11-14 years (Middle) and 14-18 years (Secondary). This new structure claims to be based greatly on the cognitive development of children and prioritising areas of focus through these ages.

The new structure also talks about the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), which aims to include pre-schools and aanganwadis (government sponsored rural child care centres in India) in an effort to impart play and activity focused learning, and train aanganwadi workers to achieve the same.

However, the treatment of the aanganwadi program is already under question from the governance and child right watchdogs and activists . This program is poorly funded and workers are poorly paid which makes the promise of training the workers for implementing the NEP goals seem quite wishful. This means rural students are likely to continue to be many steps behind urban students from the ECCE i.e ‘Foundational’ stage itself.

National Assessment Centre

NEP proposes the establishment of a National Assessment Centre, PARAKH, to set norms and guidelines for evaluations across all school boards. Report-cards are also to be redesigned and include self, teacher and peer assessment. However, the details of what will entail in these, especially peer assessment, are vague and do not take into cognizance the rampant prejudice and bullying experienced by students at the hands of peers as well as teachers on bases of weight, religion, gender, caste, class, sexuality and more. Such discriminatory practices will hurt the students from marginalised communities in both disguised and explicit ways.

The 3 Language Formula

A more controversial change comes with the 3-Language Policy, which essentially asks that “wherever possible,” the regional language or mother tongue of a student be adopted as the medium of instruction “until at least Class 5, but preferably till Class 8 and beyond.”

All schools will teach three languages, of which at least two must be native to India. The draft NEP, in fact, mandated that one of these languages be Hindi; after protests against this ‘Hindi imposition’ such as by the southern state of Tamil Nadu, this provision was removed and it has supposedly been left to the state, school and student to decide which languages would be taught.

The so-called flexibility of the policy comes at the cost of uniformity. Since the colonial era, English education has served as a means of upward social mobility for castes and tribes that had historically been denied education under Brahmanical hegemony, this progress is threatened by making English ‘optional’ in any form.

There are also unaddressed and obvious scenarios of parents who migrate or get transferred to different states, parents who speak another language at home than the regional language, and children who grow up in multilingual homes, all of which are commonplace across India. How likely is it that every student in a classroom speaks the same mother tongue or is from the same region?

Promotion of Sanskrit

The NEP desires that the rich ancient languages of India be brought back to the forefront and be given more focus as languages that can be taken up by students. In this regard it shines a spotlight on Sanskrit, a classical language rooted in Hinduism which was for centuries only accessible to Brahmins and some other upper castes. The pedestal upon which Sanskrit has been placed is being seen as discriminatory towards the large population of India who either do not have historic ties to Sanskrit or were denied access to it.

While the NEP does mention other languages that have had a strong foothold in India for a long time, such as Persian and Prakrit, it notably omits mention of Urdu and seems especially driven to ‘promote’ Sanskrit.

Vocational Education

The NEP points out that a very small portion of the Indian workforce in the age group 19-24 is exposed to vocational education, and therefore recommends that it be integrated in schools and higher education in a phased manner over the next 10 years.

A focus on vocational education starting from ages as young as 14 is also questionable, since non-formal education, often valued less than degrees, might hinder the education of poor children. This may contribute to deepening the class divide in India since receiving Undergraduate or Postgraduate degrees often guarantees poverty alleviation for such students.

Additionally, vocational education will likely form a vicious cycle with the entrenched caste system in India, reinforcing each other and the inequalities therin.

It has been repeatedly asserted by experts, citizens and politicians alike that the NEP caters more to the corporate interests over the needs of underprivileged students, and has brought much uncertainty around the question of language.

It becomes vague at key points, falling back on the argument that it is only a ‘guiding document,’ which only makes its stances seem weaker, in both theory and practice.

Whether the NEP as a whole manages to turn the tide of education in favour of those who need it the most, and is able to mobilise it as a tool for progress, presently seems more fantastical than plausible.

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